Mark Jacoby as The Wizard in the first North American tour of Wicked.
Mark Jacoby had never seen Wicked until he learned that he’d be auditioning for the role of The Wizard in the musical’s first national tour.
“The Wizard is not a big part, but it’s an interesting part. It’s more sinister than the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz. It’s political. Part of the success of it is the recognition of what power is. Good and evil. How do we define goodness?”
Jacoby’s not only continually intrigued by the intricacies of the role, he’s still staggered by the phenomenon that Wicked has become. “It plays like gangbusters everywhere. It’s beyond successful.” The tour returns to Hartford’s Bushnell Aug. 24-Sept. 11.
“There’s a generation of people now more familiar with Wicked than with The Wizard of Oz—the work on which it’s based, by way of Gregory Maguire’s audacious novelistic update, adapted for the stage by Stephen Schwartz.
“This has become the source,” Jacoby continues. “Though there are lots of tongue-in-cheek references to The Wizard of Oz for those who get them.”
With the show still packing huge venues, is it possible for its performers to sense how well some of Wicked’s well-crafted social satire goes over? “There are some political things, some social commentary things, that always get a reaction, but with theaters this size, it’s sometimes hard to gauge. That’s not to say that there’s never any variation. The Buffalo audience, you could say, was not as expressive as Florida’s. But it starts on this very high level; the show always gets this overwhelming reaction.”
When I mention how much I enjoyed Jacoby’s performance as another bumbling authority figure, the preening movie producer in a rare revival on the musical On the Twentieth Century at the Goodspeed Opera House over a decade ago, Jacoby launches into an astute analysis of why that show never caught on. “It’s too similar to Kiss Me Kate—the plot is similar, the design is similar… they even both have leading ladies named Lily.”
When asked if he has a list of dream roles he’d like to play, Jacoby says he generally doesn’t indulge in such wishful thinking, but that he would like to shed his musical-theater trappings sometime and do a production of the Yasmina Reza standard Art. He’s not even that picky who he plays in it, figuring he’s appropriate for two of the three roles in the chatty comedy.
A cerebral three-person play about a plain white painting would be a sea change from inhabiting the Emerald City. As popular as Reza’s Art has become, Jacoby notes that “when they first put Wicked in Chicago, they thought it would run four to six weeks. That became three years.” The first national tour of Wicked has been going for over six years now, and has stopped in Hartford several times.
Jacoby’s only been with the tour for eight months. “I haven’t toured like this in decades,” he says—it’s his first major national tour since Rupert Holmes’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the ‘80s. “I did a couple of productions which were technically ‘tours,’ but they were really just in one city. I did Phantom of the Opera in Chicago for nine months. Same with Show Boat”—the mid-‘90s revival of the Kern/Hammerstein classic, in which Jacoby played Gaylord Ravenal. (Show Boat is, of course, currently playing at the selfsame Goodspeed where Jacoby rode the Twentieth Century. The Cap’n Andy in that production is Lenny Wolpe, who played the Wicked Wizard himself on Broadway.)
Wicked producer David Stone has regularly recast the show in order to keep it fresh. “Wicked, having become the huge show that it is—a lot of people who’ve done come in and out of it. I think management likes to shake it up,” says Jacoby, who previously worked for producer Stone in the Brian Stokes Mitchell revival of Man of La Mancha.
“During one week of the show’s 10-week stand in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, “we had 12 hours of rehearsals,” Jacoby explains.
“Quality control is a big thing in this company. And in the whole Wicked world.”
Jacoby's Wizard with Randy Danson as Madame Morrible.